To understand POWDER, you should first understand roguelikes.
"Roguelike" is a term applied to a wide variety of games which share a
common inspiration from the game Rogue. A non-exhaustive list of such
games would be: ADOM, Nethack, Crawl, Diablo (I & II), Moria, and Angband.
My apologies to the many excellent roguelikes I didn't list. What
characterizes these games? The exact specifications are a matter of
debate - indeed, I may receive hate mail for including Diablo - but I
shall try to write a few:

Tactical play. The unit of action is based on the individual
adventurer. The game is not twitch oriented (like Quake, rewarding
reflexes & well trained actions) nor is it strategy oriented (like
Civilizations or Warcraft, requiring working on the large picture)

Based in Hack and Slash. A roguelike isn't primarily about plot
development or telling a story. It is about killing things and
acquiring treasure.

Random games. A roguelike is a dungeon crawler where no two games
are the same. The maps are different, the items are different, there
are no guaranteed win paths.

Permadeath. You die, that is it. No restoring a savegame. Good
roguelikes delete your save game after loading them. This is
compensated by the replayability of the game.

Complex interactions of properties. While the commands for a
roguelike are simple, the potential interactions are not. My favourite
example is equipping a silver ring as a weapon in order to damage a
creature vulnerable to silver, but not one's other weapons.
[Editor: This matches the Hack branch of the roguelike tree, not the
Angband branch]

Steam rolling monsters. If a critter is in your way, and weak,
you shouldn't even notice it is there.

For more information about roguelikes there is the Rogue Basin, a
Wiki documenting this genre, and the Temple of the Roguelike, a newsite
tracking developments in the field.

Having defined Roguelike, POWDER is easy to describe: A Roguelike
designed for the Gameboy Advance and Nintendo DS.

How to Win

Descend into the depths of the dungeon until you reach the foul
daemon known as "He who the author cannot spell consistently", or,
Baezl'bub. When you have slain Baezl'bub in heroic combat, or, if
Baezl'bub dies in any way, retrieve his black heart and bring it to
the surface world.

You may then go the nearest newsgroup such as
rec.games.roguelike.misc, and post YAAP (Yet Another Ascension Post).

How to Install

Note: Some POWDER files are packed with .tar.gz. Linux users can use
tar -xzvf filename.tar.gz to unpack. Windows users can
use 7-Zip to unpack.

Gameboy Advance Version

The released files are merely the .gba rom. To play it, you can
use an emulator. I personally use
VisualBoyAdvance for debugging. I do not recommend this for
playing the game, however, as if you have a real PC you should really
take advantage of the full keyboard.

Flash solutions have advanced a lot since I first released POWDER.
Modern solutions use normal flash cards to transfer the file - you can
just copy powder123.gba to your flash card and it is ready to play.
Unfortunately, being homebrew, you can't "patch" POWDER with any of
your card's special saving abilities. This might make it difficult to
save games as they need to be written from the local SRAM onto the
flash card. With a Supercard Mini SD I had luck with the "Quick
Power Cycle" method, but I have seen cartridges for which this doesn't
work.

Nintendo DS Version

Two files are present, a .ds.gba and a .nds. Depending on your
solution, you only need one of them. If in doubt, use the .nds file.
POWDER supports DLDI so you can, if needed, patch it to support
saving. During start up it prints out if it found a FAT filesystem
- if it found one saving should work. If it doesn't find one, saved
games will not survive a power cycle.

All auxillary files are saved and read from /DATA/POWDER,
regardless of where POWDER itself is copied onto your flash drive.
That directory will be created if it doesn't exist. If it fails to
create, it will default to using the current directory of POWDER.

Windows Version

The released .zip contains a simple executable. Run it.

You may need to grant execute permissions to the .dll's provided.

Mac Version

Drag and drop the POWDER program from inside the .dmg into the
location in which you want to play it. .TXT and .SAV files will be
created in that location, so you might consider making a subdirectory
rather than running on your desktop. It should then Double Click and
run.

Versions after 100 require OSX 10.4 or above, but should support
both PPC and Intel Macs.

Linux Version

The released .tar.gz contains a simple executable. Run it. You
may then discover that you need to install the most excellent SDL library. You may also discover
that your variant of Linux won't work for some arcane C runtime
library reason. Let me know the version of Linux and the error, and I
may be able to do something. Versions after and including 097 are
built on Debian Stable, and after and including 100 with statically
linked libraries.

Origins of POWDER

POWDER is a roguelike originaly developed specifically for the Gameboy
Advance (GBA). It is not a port of an existing roguelike as the controls of
the GBA are very different from the traditional keyboard, and the
screen imposes some additional limitations. It is built around
replayability and long term ergonomics, not short term learning. It
uses actual graphic tiles (16x16) rather than the traditional
characters.

I created POWDER for one simple reason: I wanted a roguelike on my
GBA. The standard RPGs were annoying me with endless battle screens
against weak enemies to unfold a drug induced plotline. I wanted a
game I could just jump into, and start killing things. Having had
more hours than I'd care to log playing Nethack, ADOM, and the
Diablos, I knew the exact type of game I wanted. The problem was I
didn't see anyone publishing it any time soon.

POWDER has grown from these humble beginnings. Years of polish
have resulted in a game which can stand on its own without needing to
rest on its uniqueness in the handheld space. This is fortunate as
Nethack can now be played effectively on the Nintendo DS.

On the DS the competition between roguelikes is fast and furious.
Not only do you have POWDER, which now fully supports the stylus, but
thanks to the power of the DS various PC roguelikes have been ported.

DSCrawl also exists if you can track down a version. Sadly, the
last version I know of didn't support DLDI so you likely won't be able
to save, a rather crippling deficiency in a game world the size of
Crawl.